In the past 30 days or so I’ve been tagged by a couple friends to do either a 16 random things or a 25 things about me post. I haven’t done ANY of them until now… so here goes. (Dang I wrote a lot!)

Oh, for those who have never seen this, you basically write a number of little known facts about yourself and ask your friends to do the same.

1. I don’t eat beef or pork or seafood – not for any particular reason
2. The only meat I do eat is boneless chicken/turkey or fish. (if I find a bone, the party is over!)
3. I’m left handed and so is most of my family on my Mother’s side.
4. I want to be married and have children, but I feel like I’m nowhere close to being ready to do either.
5. I went to school for 7 years full-time and still don’t have my degree (please hold all your ‘go get it’ comments… you won’t be the first or the last to remind me).
6. I project confidence when I’m most insecure. I only have begun to realize that in the past year or so.
7. I talk ‘in my head’ a lot. There’s a huge internal dialogue going most of the time. People who think out-loud just about confuse me!
8. I was born pre-mature and given a very bleak outlook on life by my doctors. Mom was a trooper and made the doctors second guess themselves on numerous occasions.
9. On the health theme, I have a scar near my eye that most people never notice. I had a tumor (non-cancerous) behind my left eye that undetected could have caused permanent blindness in my left eye.
10. My computer just had a blue-screen-of-death (BSOD) error because of my USB drives… so I lost 2 random facts! 🙂
11. Creativity and Performance run in both mom and dad’s sides of the family. All of us at some point have sung, acted, danced, written, directed, photographed, modeled, or played in some way or another. My grandfather was a well-known Jazz musician.
12. I’ve been using computers since age 3, had my first e-mail address in 1994, and first web page in 1996
13. I’ve had a job or my own business since the 5th grade. I was always saving for and buying the things I wanted and then selling them to get other stuff.
14. I was ordained as a minister in 1999 and did full time ministry several years.
15. I tend to keep everything… I’ve got belongings in storage in 3 difference places right now.
16. I rarely pick up the phone to call people. Even with clients connect most fluidly with those who communicate well via e-mail and text.
17. I can be myself better on a stage in front of thousands than in a small room full of complete strangers.
18. Around 18 years old I was coloring my hair for a season… very dark reddish brown.
19. This is my second time locking my hair… the first time I was totally on my own and it wasn’t going very well.
20. I’m known for giving hugs, but I’m taken by surprise when someone is physically affectionate toward me.
21. I can spend hours in a store deliberating over making a purchase on anything above $100. I always want to make sure I’m making a good investment and for the right reasons.
22. My unconscious auto-response to stress/anxiety is sleep. Before I was aware of this, there were times where I would sleep 16 hours a day.
23. In an emergency, I often have taken the lead and even done first-aid until the paramedics arrived – however if you tell me about how you nicked yourself or some other minor injury, just hearing the story will make my stomach do flips.
24. Most barbershops make me uncomfortable.
25. I’ve been in therapy with a Christian councilor for several months and it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made.

I’m excited that Andy is blogging (I’ve wanted him to start doing that for a while now) and I’m even more excited to see the cover of his book which will be released soon! He is an awesome guy that has quietly become a pretty significant person in my life. I feel blessed to know him and am excited about the doors that God is opening for him and the message that he’s bringing. It’s almost 3AM and I need to get some rest, but I had to mention at least a few words about this wonderful guy. And to top it all off… he knows the power of GREAT HUGS!!!

I’m happy to report that yesterday’s this morning’s long and tedious efforts were NOT in vain! Video is now alive and kickin’ on my site! It appears that the conflict was actually with Lightbox2 (the plug in that makes images pop up in a pretty little frame) may have been the problem.

To get things up and running, I deactivated all my plug-ins, made one change to the Lightbox2 code, and reactivated the plugins one by one untill everything was up and running! Note: the site ran JUST FINE in Firefox, but in Internet Explorer it would display an ugly Operation Aborted error. Long live Firefox!

And now to celebrate… a random video!!! 🙂

(a different video will play on every page load)

I thought I may have finally found my video solution for hosting and streaming video from DarrenCalhoun.com. And after spending hours converting and uploading videos using a the wonderful WordTube plugin, I never stopped to check and see if the site would work in Internet Explorer (which has been giving me drama through this whole process!). Well… I was all ready to call it a night when this dawned on me and BLAST… the site is NOT loading in Internet Explorer! 🙁

So that means BACK to YouTube hosted crappy videos (for now). If ANYONE can help me figure out how to make whatever corrections are needed to make this site work in IE7 – I’d love to hear from you!

Here’s a link to one of the pages with flash video embeded (opens in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer)

I was planning on blogging about how excited I am that I actually got around to encoding and posting two videos for my actor page. But that excitement got all eaten up when I tried to show the page to a friend who uses Internet Explorer 7. At present, this blog will not display on internet explorer browsers!!! From what I can tell it’s not the whole blog – just pages with flash — which was why I stopped using IE in the first place. I wanted to tell him to go and immediately download Firefox, but I’m not so happy with Firefox 3… right now it seems to be susceptible to some of the same seemingly random shut-downs that IE was prone to. The only good thing about Firefox is that it offers the ability to restore your browsing session after a failure.

In other random malfunctions… many pages that use Java Script for advanced functions (like uploading a batch of files) are now coming up with errors on my system! The Java site reports that it’s a known issue: “Too many virtual machines running in the same process” but there’s no definitive solution for it. I haven’t been uploading my batches of photos on sites like flikr, facebook, and elsewhere. Hopefully an update will be released soon. I guess everyone is having growing pains at the moment… it’ll get better after a while.

I’ve spent a bit of time yesterday and today getting DarrenCalhoun.com updated… digging in a bit more to the plug-in features and customization of WordPress… and the more I dig the more I love! I’ve never had so much ability for customizaton with so little effort!! There are some things that I’ve wanted to encorporate into a web site for YEARS that are now as simple as downloading and activating a plug-in!

Activated the Fotobook plug-in to automatically bring my Facebook albums onto this site

Switched from PHP4 to PHP5 (to get the above plug-ins working)

Installed the Featurific plug-in that features five posts from my blog in a neat flash display.

Adjusted the theme for single post pages so that the sidebars still show on those pages. (The wide display was just TOO WIDE for comfortable reading. I eventually want to have a single side bar on the posts pages, but I’ll figure that out some other time.

Added 2 new categories and began categorizing many of the ‘unclassified’ posts.

I’m getting pretty excited about this whole deal! This may be my standard means of publishing on the web from now on!

I’ve still got a pretty good backlog of blogs to manually copy and paste over from my Yahoo! 360 blog. But it’s worth it. I’m still thinking “what if someone finally releases a plug in to do this automatically? I would have wasted my current effort, but the benefit would be that the comments that were left in the old blog (dating back to 2005) would still be intact. As for now, everything has no-comments. In fact, as a right this I don’t think anyone is visiting (yet). I’ve let this domain remain mostly dormant since I first registered the name.

What I’m thinking of doing is making a second business card that directs people to this domain. The information here would generally cover everything I do outside of Quick Click Media. It would be a gateway to see my art and dance, and to connect with me on social networks. All just thoughts at this point. We’ll see.

In the mean time, I’ll keep working! Before I start ‘promoting’ my site, I want to have all of my videos online (still have my acting videos from Willow to upload – and maybe a Royal Child video if I can find it!) And I want to have my photography bio and resume completed and posted.

Hey Blog World! I'm finally back online with Animoto after a 3 month hiatus. I initially signed up for a 3 month commercial subscription and fell in love with it but didn't immediately have the mone… ...

Check out this article here to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
Brandon Heath wrote a song called “Give Me Your Eyes,” and white people loved it. Since the Christian church in America is ver… ...

I've created a slideshow of all the fun we had on July 4th. ENJOY! I really wanted to have this finished and burned to a DVD to show on the big high-def plasma screen - but the video finished render… ...

This afternoon I took some time to share with a good friend a bit of my story of hurt and healing in the Church. I feel like I've told this to everyone already, but I keep finding that I've only allu… ...

Someone wrote in to ask about how to find music that won't get flagged for copyright violations by sites like YouTube or Facebook. As more people are producing videos for online use, they are running… ...